by Nick Webb
While all this was going on, there had been developments over in Arlington Avenue. Clare was pregnant, and sooner or later she and Jonny would need Jon’s room for the forthcoming child (a Sam, as it turned out). Douglas could not camp on their squashy sofa forever. So when Jon Canter, one of nature’s gentlemen, suggested that they share a flat together, it was timely. Jon had found a flat up a narrow flight of stairs redolent of departed cats in Kingsdown Road, N19, just off the Holloway Road.* 103 Though this major thoroughfare leads directly into Upper Street in Douglas’s beloved Islington, in the late seventies it was pretty grim—a wasteland of garages, downmarket bargain stores, dodgy-looking minicab companies, unbelievable traffic, and curry houses where for peace of mind it was best not to ask exactly what creature went into the vindaloo. Near the junction with the Seven Sisters Road, another major traffic artery despite the lyrical name, pubs—warehouses full of huge men drinking with Celtic determination—offered detumescent strip shows. Jon recalls that there was nothing erotic within miles of the Holloway Road.
Jon and Douglas moved in to Kingsdown Road in January 1978, in the teeth of a miserably wet winter. The kitchen was so narrow that they could not both be in there simultaneously, and, if they were, they could not get past each other without the kind of compromise alien to both their natures. It was, says Jon, “a bit Desperate Dan-ish. In fact, the flat was a real shithole.”
It was in this unlikely environment that Douglas was to write the novel of Hitchhiker’s, but in the winter of 1977–78 that commission would have been inconceivable. Writing the radio scripts and the Dr. Who episodes was more than enough. Douglas had only tentatively emerged from the despond of failure and was still quite fragile inside, however much superficially he may sometimes have appeared to be a confident Cambridge graduate. Moreover nobody anticipated that Hitchhiker’s would explode in so many directions so quickly. Geoffrey, who has a sharp instinct for such things, reckons that he knew they had something very special by about episode four, but it’s fair to say that by and large the world was taken by surprise.
It’s worth pointing out here that the second radio series—scheduled to start pre-production in August 1979 for transmission beginning the end of January 1980—was if anything still more fraught than the first even though everybody knew by then that they had a mega-success on their hands. Once more the deadlines came excruciatingly close to the wire.
Geoffrey was again the producer. He is now Creative Director of Tiger Aspect, one of the best independent production companies. When interviewing him in his office in London’s Soho for this biography, there were moments when he sighed as he went into a trance of recollected pressure. Deep in his bones, Geoffrey understood that being the producer of any show written by Douglas was a bit like being a rat in a stress experiment of frightening subtlety.
This time Geoffrey allowed plenty of room for authorial dilatoriness by starting the whole process early, the very moment he returned from his summer holidays. It was just as well because things went very slowly, with false starts and scripts going back and forth. By mid-October they had only recorded one episode, but with transmission of six starting at the end of January, at the rate of one per week, Geoffrey thought that, though tight, the schedule was feasible. Surely they had until the middle of March to prepare the last one?
Then David Hatch, now Controller of Radio Four, fired a starshell. You can imagine the scene from one of those naval war movies with Kenneth More—klaxons going whoop, whoop all over Maida Vale, and stiff-upper-lipped chaps saying things like, “What a bore. The balloon has gone up.” David wanted to award Hitchhiker’s the ultimate accolade in terms of the BBC: the cover of the Radio Times. Despite the magazine’s title, the front cover was seldom devoted to radio; telly had the glamour. (Back in the seventies, before everybody was allowed to publish extended programme information, the Radio Times was easily the biggest selling magazine in the country. It’s still huge, with a print run that looks like the population of a country, and an even larger readership.) But as part of his negotiations with the Radio Times and the BBC hierarchy, David had agreed to make the second series more of an event by running the episodes consecutively in a single week, an arrangement known in the humid world of broadcast scheduling as “stripping.” This decision, though flattering, suddenly consumed all of Geoffrey’s carefully contrived Douglas fudge factor. The shows took months to write and a week to produce. The race was on.
It is remarkable how polished the final production sounded given its close shaves with disaster. Geoffrey recalls Douglas writing the script with actors actually in the studio:
I can remember being in a taxi going down to the Paris Studio. Douglas had given me the script and I’d read half the penultimate episode, and I’d brought the second half with me to read on the way down, which is only a five or ten minute journey. And I’m getting very excited as we got out of the cab when Douglas said, “Do you realize that this script is now actually too long, and this six or seven minute scene can come out and go into the start of the next episode—so you’ve now got seven minutes of the next episode.
So that was great. Hurrah. But when we got to the studio for the final recording, Douglas must only have written about half the script. We talked, very roughly, about what it was going to be—there was this ruler of the universe, the man in the shack, who was going to be dubbed in. So I booked Jonathan Pryce to be the ruler of the universe, and when he turned up in the studio I said, “I’m very sorry, but the ruler of the universe hasn’t been written yet,” because Douglas is now in the back room typing away on these things which gave you six carbon copies and which looked like toilet paper—sort of rather flimsy, slightly hard toilet paper. That led to the myth of people thinking the scripts had actually been written on toilet paper. Anyway, I said to Jonathan Pryce, “It’s not been written yet—do you mind being another character called Zarniwhoop?” And he said, “Who’s Zarniwhoop?” And I said, “I’m not sure, he seems to be sort of vague—a bit like you in fact.” So he did Zarniwhoop, and I said, “Well, while we’re waiting for the ruler of the universe, do you mind being a tannoy announcement?” This was right at the end of the series on this flight where they’d all been becalmed for hundreds of years waiting for the supply of lemon-scented paper napkins. Jonathan had to do this whole thing about “Return to your seat, return to your seat.” So he did that, and it was about five o’clock, and he said, “I’m really sorry, but I’m due in the theatre”—he was doing something rather major at the time—“and I’ve really got to go.” So I said, “Well, of course, that’s OK.” So by the time Douglas emerged with this bit of script, the only person left to do it was Stephen Moore. So he did it.
When we came to make the programme, we just about managed it. But Paddy Kingsland and I had been up for two nights at the radiophonic workshop. We started episode six and got most of the way through it, and then Paddy said: “I’m really sorry—I’m just hallucinating . . .” But we sort of just about finished it when Lisa [now Geoffrey’s wife] came round with some champagne to celebrate the end of the show. We hadn’t quite finished the editing, but we had no time to put anything behind that last five minutes—no time for music or effects. So I just put wind behind it because it sounded sort of eerie. And a cat. Wind and a cat.
Geoffrey winced as he described the mechanics of getting the last episode done and off to the BBC. His P.A.’s husband had been on standby for hours with his car, but had been obliged to leave. A messenger was waiting.
I just had to listen to the tape for a final check, so we played it. There was a retake that had been in the programme, so we cut it out—Lisa cut the retake out—but the tape wrapped round the capstan head, so the two of us were just cutting bits of tape and sticking them together. It left Maida Vale at about a quarter past ten, and had to get to Broadcasting House by half past ten. I got back to where I was living, only ten minutes away, and turned on the radio fully expecting to hear an announcement saying, we’re very sorry, we canno
t bring you the advertised programme. But it got there with two minutes to go.
Douglas was out of all this. After the first two shows I remember he phoned up on the Wednesday night—we were in the studio—just saying, “I thought I’d phone and find out how things were going.” And I said: “It’s a bit frantic, but we sort of got there.” And he said: “Oh good. What did you think of the show last night? I didn’t hear it actually.” We were really, really angry with Douglas—after all that, he fucking didn’t listen to the fucking programme go out!
Meanwhile, however, back on 8 March 1978, at 10:30 in the evening on Radio Four, and with no publicity perceptible to human sense, the first episode of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was broadcast. The BBC’s monitoring service was not sensitive enough to detect an audience for it, so it recorded a listening figure of zero—none at all.
Then something unusual happened. Douglas had naïvely asked Simon Brett some months beforehand what the reviews would be like. Simon had chortled kindly in order to save Douglas the disappointment. “This is radio, Douglas. We’ll be lucky to get a mention anywhere.” But the programme was reviewed that very week in two of the quality broadsheet papers, The Times and the Observer. (In the latter, the shrewd Paul Ferris, who loved it and who was particularly taken with the Babel Fish, remarked: “This just might be the most original radio comedy for years . . .”) What’s more, the programme was promoted by the most powerful mechanism known to man, one which marketing people try hardest, and with least success, to manufacture: word of mouth. The first happy listeners were stunned; they told their mates who in turn told their mates. Like neutrons hitting nuclei and producing more neutrons, a great demographic chain reaction cascaded through the population. By the second week, most of the students in the country were tuning in. By week three word had got out to the world at large, even as far as publishers in London. Simon Brett says he knew something extraordinary had happened when his squash partner, an engineer, started talking about it. By week four, the production office was receiving an unprecedented twenty to thirty letters a day—one addressed simply to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Megadodo House, Megadodo Publications, Ursa Minor. Someone in the Post Office had written “try BBC” on the corner of the letter. You would have had to be living up a pole on a small island not to have heard of the series by week five.
When the final episode was broadcast, 12 April 1978, Douglas was famous, though as yet he did not know it. There was an identifiable moment when the penny dropped—but that’s for the next chapter.
SIX
Making It
“I awoke one morning and found myself famous.”
LORD BYRON on the instant acclaim for Childe Harolde
All over the West End, in restaurants where even the starters are in French, you can spot men in crumpled corduroy suits and beautifully turned-out women toadying abjectly to smug-looking media trendies. These are publishers lunching TV producers (on expenses, God forbid otherwise) in the hope that they will be persuaded to make a huge-budget, multi-part, prime-time serial based upon one of the books in the publisher’s catalogue. The so-called TV tie-ins are all over the bookshops, sometimes to bizarre effect. Some classic title, repackaged with so much foil the book looks oven-ready, as the old joke goes, and sporting the embonpoint of some currently hot actress, will look as if it had just sprung into being that very season. It may have been selling for a century or more. “Powerful” and “searing” are two adjectives to watch out for when some fat, magnificent but stodgy nineteenth-century novel is given the tie-in treatment. The original was probably written in serial form for a market so tragically bored and desperate that length was a virtue in itself.
But, in fact, the radio, though not nearly as huge as telly in terms of rating numbers, is in many ways much more reliable. The Radio Four listeners are particularly valuable. Demographers and market researchers at the BBC will have to forgive the simplification: Radio Four reaches the concerned and educated middle classes via unerring self-selection. Its audience is pretty well the book-buying public. Radio should never be underrated as a means of selling books just because, as Dennis Potter put it, TV is the occupying power of our culture.
When Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy burst upon the airwaves in 1978, publishers took note. BBC Publishing had been given an early look at the property, as was their right, but had passed (something about which they felt immensely sick thereafter). In fairness to them, comedy and SF had always been a commercially vexed mix, and being invited to make a judgement early is not always an advantage. The world was, after all, taken by surprise. To those of us who tuned in with increasing enthusiasm every Wednesday evening, Douglas, with his wild verbal panache and wit, was clearly a wordsmith with all the instincts of a writer. It sounded so wonderful, it would surely work on the page. Pretty soon editors were beating a path to Jill Foster’s door. Dot Houghton of NEL was one of the contenders, and Nick Austin of Sphere wasn’t far behind.
It is odd to be writing a biography in which I, the author, have a small role. Other people’s lives are at least as complex as one’s own—and much more so in the case of Douglas. Just getting it down seems to do some of the subtleties a mischief. You cannot help tidying things up a little. So how should I describe myself? “Nick Webb, debonair, decisive, destined to be played in the movie by the young Clint Eastwood, swept down on the rights like a marsh harrier snatching up a vole?”
Alas, that would be a lie. The truth is that I bought the rights to Hitchhiker’s and then, at the end of 1978, left Pan for what I (mistakenly) thought was a grander job. I took no further part in Douglas’s astonishing publishing success.
In researching this book, I have found that a few people tend to overclaim about their relations with Douglas—maybe to be close to the glamour of fame—so perhaps it’s time to come clean and tell you that my part in the story is modest. I liked him a lot—and still do, despite becoming his biographer. We remained mates until he died, but we did not have one of those extraordinary and intense friendships in which Douglas invested so much. Instead we would meet up every so often, usually for lunch, and argue about science. Douglas’s voracious reading and piercing intelligence usually left me labouring along in his wake, but I knew enough to say from time to time, “Hmm, I dunno if that’s not bollocks, Douglas.” We always hugely enjoyed the ensuing argument.
At the time of the first broadcasting of Hitchhiker’s, I was the Fiction Editor at Pan Books whose staggeringly fashionable offices were above the Pan bookshop in the Fulham Road, opposite a wine bar where strangely beautiful women would lunch with each other after a heavy morning in the shops.
Pan was then owned by a consortium of three large publishers, Heinemann, Collins, and Macmillan, and this ownership helped give it access to some of the most desirable paperback rights in the market. Paperback companies were distinct from hardback companies in those days, and most of what appeared in paperback was published under a licence, usually of eight or ten years, bought from the first publisher of the work. Back in the seventies, before the era of conglomeration, there were many of these independent hardcover publishers. Only a few remain. One of the tasks of a paperback editor was to scout these houses and negotiate for the mass-market rights in books that looked as if they would have a robust second life in paperback. Because at that time paperbackers did not originate as much as the hardcover houses (something that changed markedly over the next decades), they were often patronized (“not real publishers, old boy”) while at the same time being treated as chequebooks on the hoof whose sole purpose was to underwrite some hardcover publisher’s dodgier investments.
Ralph Vernon-Hunt, Pan’s Managing Director, just like the retiring generation of BBC producers, genuinely was an ex-bomber pilot.* 104 He was a charming man with a long, bony face, a roguish smile and a salty no-bullshit manner—very brisk and no-nonsense when it came to business. Sonny Mehta, a handsome, aristocratic Indian with good taste and intuition
, was the Editorial Director. He is now President and Editor-in-Chief of Knopf, and one of the industry’s élite. Sonny is often credited with starting what became the trade paperback revolution when he launched the Paladin list and published Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch. (Trade paperbacks are larger, more expensive and usually more literary than the mass-market variety.) Simon Master, a clever, somewhat cool man with family connections to the firm, ran the systems, and there was a legendary Sales Director, grey, streetwise and tough, called Bob Williams, who ruled a formidable bunch of representatives with steel beneath a steel gauntlet. There were many others in what was a very competent team highly regarded within the publishing parish.
If they buy a winner, editors always shrewdly maintain it was their judgement and not luck. On the other hand, if they buy a complete dog, it’s invariably because some idiot in the art department failed to package the book properly, the reps never understood it and the big chains suffered a pusillanimous courage bypass by failing to order enough copies (or, in extreme cases, any). I was lucky enough to be tipped off. My soon to be brother-in-law in darkest Norfolk had told me to listen to Hitchhiker’s on the radio; I was completely overwhelmed by the humour, its bleak philosophical jokes and its sheer verbal dexterity. This bloke Adams, I thought, must write a novel. In all honesty I had not the slightest inkling that the book would go as bananas as it did.
But first, through the good offices of Jill Foster, I met Douglas and John Lloyd in a pub in Argyll St., near the London Palladium. It must have been about the end of May 1978. The Argyll Arms is one of those noisy pubs, a great rectangle of a room divided into smaller bars by Victorian glass, and full of youngsters flirting urgently. Despite this, Douglas and I, being much the same height, managed to talk above the hubbub. We discussed Wittgenstein and quantum physics. Actually that’s a fib. I could bluff and report what we said in immense detail, but all I can remember is that we talked about Hitchhiker’s and SF in general, and that he surprised me by not having a philosophy degree. Instead, much more valuably, he possessed a philosophical turn of mind. I thought he was rather wonderful. John Lloyd was also on good form, but harder to hear in this ill-chosen venue. I do recall how the women in the pub instantly clocked him even though Douglas and I did not register on their radar at all.
